Maurice Richard, the first cinematic biopic of the hockey player, opens in darkness. Sounds of disorder accompany the slow lighting of the screen, along with the appearance of a title: 'Montreal, 1955.' Canadians over a certain age probably won't require further sign-posting to guess that the film is about to frame Richard's life with a re-enactment of the violence that followed his suspension near the end of the 1954-55 season. The Richard Riot, after all, is now credited with sounding an early warning for the Quiet Revolution to come in Quebec.

Some knowledge of the incident is almost obligatory to make sense of the vague montage that unfolds, much of it in slow motion. Men in over-coats and fedoras gesticulate in corridors; a letter is sealed and delivered with the solemnity of an offer of surrender from an army. Cheers greet the reading of the letter behind a closed door. Faces outside the chamber wear expressions of bitter defeat.

Without further illumination, the scene suddenly shifts to 'Montreal 1937 – The Great Darkness.' ("La Grande Noirseur.") A seventeen-year-old Maurice Richard toils as a factory machinist. His head is bowed and his cheeks are covered in grime. When a fellow worker mutters insurrection into his ear, he listens in grave silence. Moments later an English patron bellows at Richard in that language, demanding he rat on his fellow French Canadian. The boss is chubby and malevolent and blows smoke rings with his cigar.

Shortly afterwards we are in an outdoor hockey rink in a city park. Richard, arriving directly from the factory, barely has a chance to lace his skates before he and his squad are being roughed up by their opponents. With time running out, his coach delivers the variety of sports-movie speech that inspires the teen to score two quick goals, both of which display his soon-to-be-trademark assaults on the net. His girlfriend, eventually to become his wife, glows her affection from the boards.

At a cost of nine million dollars, Maurice Richard is the most expensive film ever produced in Quebec. It is also an often engrossing and visually splendid two hours of hagiography, boasting many of the same populist impulses of its American counterparts, including the Ray Charles biography Ray and the recent take on Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line." Pleasing local audiences is something the Quebec movie industry does well. Maurice Richard, opening this month across the province and starring Roy Dupuis, is a likely Christmas hit.

But as a summary of the first ten minutes suggests, director Charles Biname's ambitions actually go beyond the hagiographic. He and script-writer Alec Scott are building a case for Richard as a hero of a particular sort. Not content with Maurice Richard's present status as exemplar of both private courage and French Canadian pride during the1940s and 50s, the film aspires to recast him, in effect, as a romantic hero, a figure of necessary solitude and enigmatic character.

He is, moreover, a romantic hero assigned the task of building a nation – or boosting the spirit of a nation-in-embryo, perhaps – through his brilliant goal scoring and righteous anger alike. As presented in Maurice Richard, the fiery on-ice skill and off-ice outrage at the injustices suffered by the French in both the NHL and within their own society are equally intrinsic to Richard's self-definition as a Quebecer, and a man. He is rarely shown struggling with personal limitations or demons or even simply trying to do right for his family; always, the battle is between the hero, acting on behalf of his people, and the world. Thus, when Richard glances out a train window en route to a 1945 game in Boston to confront a notorious Bruins thug, he observes battleships churning in the seas – a metaphor for his ongoing war. Likewise, a game-day move to a larger apartment in Montreal, where he hauls furniture up an outdoors staircase during a snowstorm, is transformed by Biname into a struggle akin to a solo ascent of Mount Everest. This, despite the anecdote's conclusion: though he confesses to his coach, Dick Irwin, that he is exhausted from the work, Richard scores five goals that night.

"It's important that French Canadians win once in a while," his barber and confidante tells him on the eve of another confrontation. As always, the hero sits alone in the shop, listening quietly to the views and complaints of one of his loyal subjects. Children glance through the window in respectful awe.

His modest physical stature notwithstanding – he stood just 5'7'' and weighed 170 lbs – Maurice Richard, who passed away in 2000, is of sufficient historical stature to play the part the film assigns him. A few distortions aside, and one or two excess Anglos shouting epithets about "Pea Soupers" and "damn French Canadians," Maurice Richard offers a credible, if slanted, rendering of his career.

More the issue is whether the romantic hero is as interesting as the other available takes on this great and singular athlete. Missing from the film is the role of character in elucidating how Maurice Richard conducted himself, both for good and for ill. There is the real shame, for within the discipline and wildness, courtesy and rectitude, gentleness and violence, of his personality can be found important home-grown truths about not only one Quebecois man but about men in general – and about the Quebec in particular – of his time.

Richard was born on August 4, 1921, in the Montreal neighbourhood of Bordeaux. The oldest of eight children (his brother Henri, the 'Pocket Rocket' who played twenty seasons in the NHL, was six when Maurice left the house), he quit school to take a job in a CPR machine shop to help his family through the Depression. Though a star with the Verdun Juniors, a string of injuries, including two broken ankles and a fractured arm, earned him the rap of being too brittle for the pros. Rejected for the same reason by the Canadian army, he continued as a machinist while honing his hockey skills. No Sidney Crosby or Wayne Gretzky, Richard was twenty-three before finally catching on with the Canadians. Just one year later, during the 1944-45 season, he scored fifty goals in fifty games.

By then Richard was married to his teenage sweetheart, Lucille Norchet, and was the father of two babies. A touching scene in Maurice Richard shows Lucille in the hospital bed after the birth of their first child. She is offering her husband stern hockey advice; he is holding his daughter and weeping with joy. The Richards, both devout Catholics, raised seven children and were parted only by Lucille's death in 1995, after fifty-one years of marriage. Richard adored his family and remained close to them, and to the church, all his life.

Like many of his generation, Maurice Richard was raised to value duty and honour, as well as to defer to various authorities without complaint or even much self-reflection. His own path from being the unilingual, almost pathologically shy young man who defined the Canadians starting in 1945 to the outspoken and increasingly enervated representative of all French Canada in the NHL a decade later – a path that Biname charts forcefully in the film – is indeed a striking one.

But it remains the route taken by a man operating from a belief system born of his own experiences and nature. Just as, less gloriously, Richard's feckless post-hockey career, which included spells selling fishing tackle and schilling for a hair treatment product, was consistent with his character. Men of his time were unaware that they could or even should reinvent themselves in mid-life. They were who they were, and thought little on the matter.

The film, though, pushes these character complications aside in order to uphold Richard as the timeless solitary hero. After a sweet on-screen courtship, his wife, played by Julie Le Breton, is reduced to minimal dialogue and maximum doe-eyed concern at the trails her warrior husband must undergo. His children are scarcely glimpsed, and his parents and siblings are all but unseen. As for Richard's Catholicism, it is swept into a corner as well – belonging, apparently, to the dark ages of those nasty patrons and the eternal reign of Duplessis.

A superior recent Quebecois film, C.R.A.Z.Y., does greater justice to the dynamics of mid-century Quebec. But it concerns the trials of an ordinary family starting in the 60s, by which time the Catholic church was already losing its authority in most lives.

Missing, too, from Maurice Richard are the Rocket's team-mates and opponents. The hockey sequences are vivid, and in a few instances represent recreations of goals never captured before – occurring, as they did, before television. But Richard bests mostly anonymous enemies wearing odd uniforms. (The movie had to alter team insignias for legal reasons.) Even his epic rivalry with his nemesis and foil Gordie Howe is ignored.

But then, his own Habs fare only a little better. Richard didn't win eight Stanley Cups on his own. Still, his legendary team-mates, including Toe Blake and Elmer Lach, though portrayed in the film by real-life NHL stars, among them Vincent Lecavalier as the young Jean Beliveau, remain mostly mute and incidental.

Roy Dupuis's performance does what it can to deny this narrowing of man into myth. The actor, who also incarnated Richard in a 1999 TV mini-series, understands his character's taciturn nature. He is similarly perceptive about Maurice Richard's intensity, especially the fire that blackened his eyes during games, and how that passion could spill over occasionally into derangement.

The Richard Riot was one such instance. Well known is that the riots in and around the Forum on March 17, 1955 were triggered by league commissioner Clarence Campbell's decision to suspend Richard for the remainder of the season and play-offs. Less remembered was the reason for the severity of the punishment. Four nights earlier, in Boston, Richard reacted to a vicious slash across the left side of his skull by pounding the offender, a defenseman named Hal Laycoe, over the head and shoulders with his stick. When a linesman insisted on restraining the star, Richard attacked him too, bruising his face and blackening his eye. He had previously assaulted other referees and linesmen both on ice and off.

While Maurice Richard was emotionally exhausted at the time of the incident in Boston, his violence actions were still shocking. (Today, he would probably be tried for assault.) He admitted as much on radio after the riots, and his confession, and plea for calm, is the only actual scene from that tumultuous event shown in Maurice Richard, besides the early montage following the flight of Campbell's letter forfeiting the game to the visiting Detroit Red Wings.

According to the September 17, 1955 issue of this magazine, Richard's actions, and the reactions of the league, set off the "the most destructive and frenzied riot in the history of Canadian sport." Biname's decision not to dramatize the riot – the film's natural climax, suggested by its own opening – is surprising. It may be that the director wasn't interested in showing the street mayhem. It may also be that the moral complexity of the event doesn't suit the movie's inspirational trajectory.

Do young Quebecers require such a broad-strokes lesson to help them distinguish The Rocket from Boom Boom, or even The Great Darkness from The Quiet Revolution? If so, Maurice Richard may well provide a stylish slice of history lite to help those civics classes. But while myths may be inspired by heroes, history is forever being shaped by individuals through the force of their characters. The story of how the character of Maurice Richard changed Quebec and Canada remains to be properly told.